By Iris Mahoney July 10, But the conversation that followed, and that continued to surface for the next decade or more, had much more impact than the explanation of conception. Sex is for marriage. You should wait to find the right person. And so I waited.

The high rates extend even to women born in the s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past. Finer is a research director at the Guttmacher Institute, a private New York-based think tank that studies sexual and reproductive issues and which disagrees with government-funded programs that rely primarily on abstinence-only teachings. The study, released Tuesday, appears in the new issue of Public Health Reports. The study, examining how sexual behavior before marriage has changed over time, was based on interviews conducted with more than 38, people -- about 33, of them women -- in , , and for the federal National Survey of Family Growth.

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Policy and programmatic efforts promoting sexual abstinence until marriage have increased, but it is unclear whether establishing such behavior as normative is a realistic public health goal. This study examined the proportion of individuals in various cohorts who had had premarital sex defined as either having had vaginal intercourse before first marrying or ever having had intercourse and never having married by various ages. Data from four cycles of the National Survey of Family Growth, —, and event history analysis techniques, including Kaplan-Meier life-table procedures and Cox proportional-hazards regression models, were used to examine the incidence of premarital sex by gender and historical cohort. Almost all Americans have sex before marrying. These findings argue for education and interventions that provide the skills and information people need to protect themselves from unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases once they become sexually active, regardless of marital status.